A tough anti-spam law passed by the state of Virginia has officially been declared dead following the refusal by the US Supreme Court to reinstate a felony conviction prosecuted under the statute.
The high court on Monday declined to review an appeal challenging a lower-court ruling that declared the anti-spam law …

How do I email this much maligned citizen?

Makes sense

I can't fault the supreme court for throwing the case out due to infringing the 1st amendment rights. Set a precedent for abolishing free speech and other cases can draw on it. But letting that twat go...nuh-uh.

Great.

"The high court on Monday declined to review an appeal challenging a lower-court ruling that declared the anti-spam law unconstitutional because it barred all anonymous, unsolicited mass emails, including those with political, religious, or other protected content."

So what the court essentially said is that any political or religious wingnut can fill all the email boxes on the planet with impunity. Wonderful.

When are these idiots going to understand that spam, in any form, doesn't scale?

@ David Eddleman

They are not infringing anyone's rights.

Free speech means you can say what you want without fear of prosecution. It does NOT give you the right to force it on other people against their wishes.

It does not mean that every religious nut has the inviolable right to jam people's email boxes, crash their ISP's servers, and slow down the whole net at vast cost to everyone just so they can send out millions upon millions of copies of their personal rants.

If that's how the supine court interprets that amendment then it's about time the amendment was dumped, or at minimum heavily modified.

Stop, you twats

This law wasn't about spam. It was about "spoofing" the headers. With an aggravation for spam.

I'm glad it was barred. Now keep only the spam part, and it's good to go. Also, if this particular campaign crashed AOL servers, I supposed this guy could still be charged with that, regardless of the fact that he modified some headers.

@Greg - the question is whether we protect speech,

Virginia High Court = Dopes. US Supreme Court has more important matters.

The way I read this is that the Supreme's just decided that they didn't want to review it.

I guess their attitude is "do we have to review everything!?". They're right. The original stupid ruling the one the Virgina prosecuter was appealing), was handed down by the Virginia State Supreme Court (see Sep. 2008 article in the Reg's related-links section).

The US Supreme Court doesn't have time to review every stupid ruling made by lower courts. They're probably wishing, just like the rest of us, that Virginia had competent judges in the first place. Maybe if they let the moronic ruling stand, the Virginia voters might actually pay attention to the qualifications of the Idiots they vote into service. (Well, I can dream, can't I?)